


The Possession

by illwynd



Category: Thor (Comics), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood, Horror, Human Sacrifice, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Knifeplay, M/M, Politics, Possession, Sensation Play, Sibling Incest, Spirits, Violence, sacred twins, spookyfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2020-11-15 03:54:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20859803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illwynd/pseuds/illwynd
Summary: Thor and Loki have been dead for centuries, but Loki finds a way back from the spirit realm. At first, all is well. Then Thor realizes that Loki means for them to stay.





	1. Spirits

**Author's Note:**

> Have some thorki spookyfic for October! This one is very weird. I hope you enjoy it.

The spirit world was overlaid upon the mortal realm, but separate. 

Within it, the bodiless awareness might pass a thousand years as easily as a fortnight, while mortal life flickered by all around and through. It was like watching a play through a hazy gauze, the details blurred, a dance of shadow and light and color and shape. Only with great focus could one pick out any particular part of life to spy upon. 

The spirit world itself was also shot through with such a haze. In most cases, the spirits that inhabited it did so only briefly, passing through from here to there, to whatever lay beyond. They looked like mists of white or grey or pale blue, swiftly losing the shape they once wore before dissipating into nothing, in a span of time that seemed like the blink of an eye. 

That, at least, was what Thor had observed in all the time since he had died. 

He and his twin brother were the only such souls he knew of that remained in the spirit realm and showed no sign of moving onward, and he was glad they had each other. That was what made this ongoing existence not merely bearable but joyful, in a quiet way. They had always been together, and as long as they remained so, nothing could be terribly wrong. Thus, across the spirit realm they wandered, floating weightless (indeed, the whole idea of weight and solidity and mass was something he had forgotten, something he could no longer make sense of, like a property of a dream upon waking). So they drifted, time passing all around them, communing without words and mostly never needing them. 

They might have continued like that eternally, except Thor had begun to sense in his brother the growing of an urge. An irritation. A longing. And he was not surprised when Loki proposed it. 

“There is something I have been thinking about for a long time,” Loki confessed. “Something I have been trying to decipher, and I think I have gotten it at last.”

“Yes?” said Thor in response (or rather, he spoke it wordlessly, like a nudge of a shoulder, a raised eyebrow, a squeeze of a hand). 

“I think I can get us bodies again.”

Thor did the equivalent of taking a sharp breath of surprise. “How?”

“We can borrow them from living people. I’ve come up with a way that ought to work, and they won’t even know. To them it will be just like sleeping, and we’ll have a chance again to be alive. To taste food and breathe air and feel the sun and whatever else we would like to do.”

Loki did not have to say what  _ else _ he meant, what other things they had both been missing ever since they had died, and Thor somehow felt stirred even without a body in which to feel it. 

Thor barely had to think about it before he answered, eagerly.

“What do we need to do?”

Loki had taught him the process then, indescribable in any physical terms. 

“How did you discover this method?” Thor asked as he practiced the first few pieces like a dancer learning a new step, a fencer learning a new routine.

Loki did not answer, a reticent shrug and a spectral gesture that meant it wasn’t important, that the question was almost beneath his notice. Instead Thor could feel him begin to focus, stretching his attention toward the mortal realm. Searching among the countless living people for the bodies they would borrow. 

Thor was able to follow his thoughts effortlessly, flowing down the same path like a beam of light or a current of water in a wide stream, and he realized from what they found that it had been some time since they had been alive. Things were different, almost unrecognizable. 

Much of the world was still wild, forests and mountains and open field. And much of the world was still the same sort of cultivated land that they had known. Farmland, ploughed rows and tall corn, ambling livestock, groves of fruiting trees. But onward, into the villages, the cities… 

Thor gazed in awe. 

He had sometimes tried to watch the living from the spirit realm, wanting to feel some connection to that world of life and matter, imagining himself as their protector, but the last few times he had tried he had soon ceased, finding their thoughts foreign and strange. And now he could see why. 

They sped along the roads in metal contraptions, and they effortlessly commanded light and heat and cold in their own homes, and they indulged in entertainments for which Thor had no frame of reference. 

They had temples still, but Thor saw no blood on their altars, no children to be venerated and then finally sacrificed. 

They had superstitions as well, but these seemed dying habits which even those who practiced them felt foolish as they did so. 

The understanding intrigued him even as it frightened him in how distant and alien it all seemed from the world in which he had once lived. 

But Loki was focusing even more now, and he found them at last. Their targets. 

They were not a perfect match, but it was easy to see why Loki chose them. One man was tall and lean and black-haired. The other had ruddy skin and sun-touched blond hair and a broad build. And they suited each other, no matter how little alike they looked. They seemed to fit together, and they dwelled in the same house, alone. 

There would be no nearby kin to notice the change in the pair over the coming days. No one to whom they would need to explain themselves. 

Thor could feel his twin’s eagerness, and Loki urged him to start first, to make the first step toward taking possession. 

* * *

The very last step felt like a push. Like putting his back into moving something very heavy—this was a metaphor that only then came back to him—but with great force and persistence, he finally felt it groan and give way, and then, much more swiftly, he was sucked in with a sensation like being pulled, or like falling through a narrow aperture into some unseen void beyond. 

And then, he was opening his eyes and bolts of searing liquid gold were streaming through them—no, that was not how it would be said. He was opening his eyes, and the world seemed made of light, so bright he had to blink and throw his arm over his face until, after a few moments, it was not so overwhelming to see. 

Light and shadow resolved into shapes. Shapes resolved into details. 

He was lying in a bed, and a window was open to his left, letting all that light in. 

To his right, someone else was moving, making soft noises as if trying to speak for the first time in ages. 

Thor rolled onto his side to look, and the face that gazed back at him… it was not quite his brother’s face, but there were similarities. And having Loki within that body had made it look more like Loki than it surely had before. The way he held his mouth, his eyebrows. A certain glint to his eyes. 

Thor studied him, reacquainting himself with the whole variety of physical sensations of being alive. 

The awareness—all-encompassing at first but swiftly fading from the forefront of his thoughts—of the heart beating in this chest, the blood flowing through the vessels, the breath cycling in and out like a whisper, a thousand little processes of living. 

Then it became just the softness of the sheets against his body. The freshness of the air, and the pleasant coolness of it where it stirred the fine hairs of his arm lying atop the blankets, the rest of him warm beneath. The faint sounds from all around, no unity to them, just the noises of life occurring beyond the space of this dwelling. 

The emptiness where his brother’s thoughts would be. That shared awareness, which had been with him for hundreds of years (or more—he wasn’t sure, and he meant to find out at some point), it had gone utterly silent. Once again they were separated by skin, by the flesh and bones of their different bodies. 

Yet he could read those thoughts in his brother’s expression anyway, and in his actions. The hand emerging from under the covers and reaching over to him, pushing the sheets down. 

The man whose body he was in slept nude, and Thor watched his brother discover this fact. He watched Loki’s pupils widen, his eyes seeming to darken. 

Loki’s hand trailed down his chest, and Thor shivered at the sensation, feeling gooseflesh rise on his arms, on the soft skin of his belly. Loki’s hand did not stop but delved lower, touching the thick organ that was swiftly filling with blood and becoming erect. 

There was a smile spreading onto Loki’s face, and Thor felt himself mirroring it. 

That was what they were. This was what they had always done. They had been raised in the temple, the sacred twins. Among their people there had been few greater prohibitions than to make love with one’s own kin, yet in them it was accepted. Encouraged. 

They had explored each other’s bodies young. They had learned pleasure when it was still the simplest of things, before their cocks were matured for the purpose, giving only sweet, dry little orgasms when they touched each other or sucked on each other. And they had continued as they grew. 

It had been pure and obscene at once, and that was what made it sacred. 

And as they grew, their individual tendencies began to show through. Loki was the smaller and crueler of them, and he took special delight in pushing his brother down onto the bed and taking him. Loki was the one who laughed at pratfalls, and nature had endowed him to the point of indecency, and he thrilled in doing whatever it took to make Thor blush and moan. 

Thor, the larger and stronger and more generous, thrilled in letting him, in being overtaken. 

And that was what he did now, though every touch was utterly new. They had not had bodies with which to do this in so long. He had not experienced touch or pleasure in all that time. And these bodies were also new, still to be learned. So Thor shivered uncontrollably as Loki bent his head over Thor’s waist and took the tip of Thor’s cock into his mouth, suckling. It made him cry out.

Exploratory fingers in the tight curls of hair around the root of his cock. Trailing down to stroke his balls, which made him tense and moan louder. Smoothing up across his belly once more, down over the sides of his waist.

Thor was aware of the sensation of the heart beating wild in his chest, the wet suction of his brother’s mouth upon him, the moment eternal in a way that put all their years in the spirit realm to shame, the moment then crashing down upon him like the waves of the sea that he remembered only distantly, distant but powerful, a sudden memory of saltwater in his nose and disorientation and the tidal pull but he could not remember when it had happened, how it had happened, and then it was gone and there was just his heart beating and the pleasure passing through him in waves. Panting. Sweating. So many simple physical, mortal things. 

His brother pulling him close, wrapping arms around his waist, kissing his belly. Then Loki looked up at him. 

“What next?” he asked, and Thor was not sure whether he was surprised at the sound of Loki’s voice, or at the sudden awareness that they had greeted one another back into the physical world with sex before words. 

Many things, in fact, should have been surprising. That it was decidedly not their native tongue that he spoke—it was whatever language these two men used in their lives—yet Thor understood it perfectly. That he had relearned how to speak without a stumble, and Thor likewise needed no time to relearn how to perceive the speech he heard. That his voice, like his face, was not Loki’s, yet it took on the timbre and character of Loki’s voice by virtue of him speaking with it. 

Yet Thor wasted no time on surprise. 

“Whatever you wish, brother,” he said, his hunger already growing once more. “I wish to do everything we can while we have this chance.”

_ Everything _ took many hours. Hours that stretched into evening, so that in between bouts of lovemaking they ventured out into the kitchen, where they discovered food in abundance, kept cold by modern inventions, much of it prepared and ready to be heated or simply eaten as it was, and despite the multitude of strange and unexpected flavors, Thor tried them all with relish. 

Eating again, having a body that required it, was a wholly different sort of pleasure, and one that he had not realized he missed as much as he apparently had. 

He sampled cheeses and jams from the refrigerator with the breads and nuts he found in the various cabinets. He discovered the bowl of fresh fruit and bit eagerly into a ripe peach, licked the dripping nectar off his fingers (and called Loki over to do the same, which ended up back in the bedroom, or would have if Loki had been able to wait that long. Instead Loki discovered as well the oils in another cabinet and bent Thor over the countertop where he was, sliding slippery fingers into him until he was writhing with need).

That evening, Loki, after peering warily at various instructions, managed to cook for them a meal of something called pasta in a strange red sauce, and they ate it together, laughing at their mutual attempts to keep the slithering strands upon their utensils.

Laughing also felt good, and Thor had missed it. He had missed his brother’s shoulder bumping companionably against his as they lounged, belly-full. The feeling of his warmth and his breathing. 

For a few minutes, Thor closed his eyes. 

When he did, he was briefly sunk into cold, dark, turbulent water, and then… then he was gazing upon his brother again, but it was different. It was truly his brother’s face, from their old lives. Just like the last time he had seen it.

His eyes jerked open again, pulling him out of the jumbled memory.

He had forgotten about dreams. Nightmares. Beside him, Loki stirred, rolled to his side and stroked Thor’s hair back from his slightly damp brow, gazing at him. 

“Are you all right?” 

Thor swallowed, trying to forget that vision again, trying to put it forcefully out of his mind. He nodded. “Yes. Fine.”

“Mm. If you’re nodding off, perhaps we should retire truly, though. The bed will be more comfortable.” 

Thor was not exactly eager to sleep, to return to the place where such dreams could find him. But Loki wasn’t wrong; he was weary. Even if he hated also to lose any of the time they would have here, in these bodies. It would have to be brief. Only a few days at most, and then they would have to relinquish them again to the men whose lives they had invaded. 

Thor let himself be lured back into the bedroom with the promise of one more round before they let sleep claim them for the night, and they fitted together so perfectly, naked in each other’s arms, rubbing against each other languidly. 

Thor kissed his brother, feeling the softness of Loki’s lips on his. The sweetness of their hearts beating together through their flesh. 

His twin. His mirror image, no matter how different they appeared. His love. And pleasure was once again simple, as it had long ago been. 

They shuddered through it together, still kissing, kissing, touching, breathing, until sleep came once again, dark and blessedly dreamless. 

* * *

The next day they managed to sate their lusts enough that they could venture outdoors for a while. 

Just into the area around the dwelling at first, taking their breakfast out on the terrace, where many pots of greenery had been carefully tended. Flowers bloomed as the sun caressed the space, and Thor sat with the breeze ruffling his hair and tears pricking at his eyes. Such simple things. 

Later, Loki wanted to go exploring. Neither of them was willing to attempt to pilot the massive vehicle that they had discovered in the garage, but there was plenty to discover on their own feet. They wandered up and down the streets, passing homes and businesses and markets, parks of cropped grass and spots of shade cast by the trees dotted here and there; Loki peered around with an assessing eye. 

“The world is so different now. It is all so new and clean,” Thor mused as they passed yet another glass-fronted shop with riches on display in its window.

“Hmm,” Loki answered, and Thor recognized it as a noise of mild disagreement, or some other competing thought that Loki was having at the moment. “I suppose you could say that.”

“Do you not like it?”

A twitch of the shoulders. “It’s pleasant enough. Different, though, as you said. It is hard to really get a sense for what sort of place this is and whether this is where we ought to be.”

Thor wasn’t sure what exactly his brother meant, and he waited a moment to see if any further explanation would be forthcoming, but instead Loki only reached out to touch one of the fancy metal posts that ran along the walkway. He trailed a finger along it, then brushed away the grit that had collected on his fingertip.

“Hmm.”

When they began to grow tired (what a sensation that was, as well! The soft strain in the muscles, the urge to rest and relax—Thor stretched out his arms to savor it) they retraced their steps, back to the house where their hosts lived, and again spent the evening in each other’s arms. 

That night, when they took breaks to recuperate, Loki spent the time at the various screens he had found within the house. The television, the computers, which brought him any information he requested, merely at a word. 

Thor watched over his shoulder while Loki studied this world. Various topics, at first; Loki read page after page on history and more recent events. He studied maps, clicked brightly colored links to find out more, following ideas like threads in a tapestry. 

After a while, Thor realized that Loki’s searches had been circling the area they had come to, lives of the sort they were inhabiting now. 

Loki’s brows, also, had drawn together in a frown, yet eventually he shrugged away the thought and stood, stretching, rolling his arms back. 

“Well, that is probably enough of that. And I suspect it would be best for these men if we allow them to have their bodies back by the morning. But let us enjoy them for a little while longer, brother?”

Thor had readily agreed as Loki pulled him into a kiss.

* * *

Returning to the spirit realm, departing from these borrowed bodies, felt endlessly strange. There was less force involved than there had been in entering them, and it was not like dying, and there was no pain, but in a way it was very much like peeling off something more tenacious than clothes. Like peeling off skin and going full bare.

Mortal senses, so vivid and full, falling away.

Other ones, subtler ones, replacing them. 

Thor could feel his twin’s mind at once, was aware again of the path of Loki’s thoughts. And it was strange that he had forgotten what it was to  _ not _ be aware of them, such that he now followed their logic with a growing uneasiness, as if his brother had suddenly become a stranger. 

“You had meant to stay there? Forever?” he asked when he had grasped the path of them in full.

Loki shrugged, in his mind. “I hoped to. But those men had little power. Comfortable enough lives, but not what I wanted. We can do better. I will find better ones next time.”

The idea of it seeped through Thor, chill and eerie. “But if we stay, whoever we are taking from… we would be stealing their lives, not just a few days of time.”

“We’re not  _ killing _ them,” Loki answered, dismissive. “To them, it’s like they’re sleeping. And someday, when those bodies die, they’ll go where they’re meant to anyway.”

Becoming upset in the spirit realm was different from doing so with a body. Thor had no heart to race, no breath to catch, no veins to fill with a rush of anxious distress. It was different from that, yet no less disturbing. No less unpleasant. 

“We’re not going to do that. It  _ is _ like killing them. And we more than anyone else should know better!” If he had still had a body, his voice would have been strained, on the verge of yelling. His eyes would have burned and stung. 

Softly, quietly, Loki backed down. 

Thor could feel his thoughts pull away from the idea. Instead, Loki moved toward him. Soothing him. Caressing.

“All right, brother, all right. If you don’t want to, we won’t. But I would still like to go back. I will find us another pair to borrow from—we can do that as many times as we like, just a few days each, so that we won’t take too much life from any of them. All right? We won’t do them any harm, I swear it.”

Gradually Thor let himself be coaxed and convinced to give his acquiescence. 

Being in a body again had been so good. It was hard to resist the idea, especially with his brother’s spectral form mingling pleasantly with his with the reminder of fleshly pleasures so fresh in his memory. 

Loki wanted that again, and so did he, and they could have it. 

Thor could hardly say no.

***


	2. The Next Second Chance

Again, time passed amorphously, uncertain, and Thor floated in a lull in which his thoughts were weighted down by an uncharacteristic gloom.

He had been like that for centuries after their death, the horror and misery of it lingering in him, and he had no longer believed there had been any good in their sacrifice. 

He had felt betrayed. He had felt cheated. And above all he had known that such feelings would never be satisfied.

He and his brother could never be avenged. The wrong could not be righted. The people who had killed them were by then long since dead themselves, and even the place in which they had dwelt had been forgotten, erased from every map, unrecorded in even the oldest books. 

So there was no point in feeling it, since there was nothing to be done with the anger. The knowledge soured in him into a deep, painful hollowness.

Loki, on the other hand, had seemed to deal with it better; he had been angry when they were still alive. He had fought and struggled while it still mattered. 

Maybe that was why.

So Loki had instead been the voice that was there to calm Thor, to talk him down with wry words and soft sighs. Loki had been the comforting presence, the quiet reason, the other half of him which gave their continued existence at least some meaning, some purpose. 

“At least we are still together,” Loki said. “At least we are still here. And it must be because we are the sacred twins; how many other souls can stay?”

Thor, in his darkest moods, had answered, “Perhaps whatever comes after will not have us either.”

Loki had always laughed at that and curled against him, the soft grey shape of his spirit. 

“Oh, Thor,” he said. “Oh, Thor.”

Now Thor’s mood was not nearly so dark as that. Yet a gloom had come over him, a drop after the exhilaration of inhabiting a living body with all its joys. 

“Have you found our next hosts yet?” he asked when he felt time was passing too slowly, or else too much of it was flowing by. 

“I haven’t. I’m looking for just the right ones. Don’t be impatient,” Loki chided.

Thor did his best to obey.

And then at last Loki found what he sought. 

Thor sensed his excitement at once, and he followed it to their aim, and when he too focused on the living people Loki had found, he was awestruck.

These two looked even more like _ them_. And—Thor wondered how much time had really passed, this time—he could feel almost impossible riches all around them, power threaded through their lives. This pair had but to speak a word and their will would be done. They lived like gods, as far as Thor could tell. 

It was… almost frightening. 

When he and Loki had been alive, they had dwelt in the temple, and all their needs and wants had been fulfilled. They had never worked at anything more difficult than preparing for the ceremonies they had attended, or the romping play (like two young pups) that had kept their bodies healthy and comely, as befitted their role. They had been bedecked with riches. Fed and pampered and clothed in finery.

And still they could not have dreamed of such lives as these. 

If he’d had a body at that moment, Thor would have trembled with nervous anticipation. 

“Are you ready?” his brother asked. “Do you remember what to do?”

“Yes,” Thor said, already beginning, anxious to be alive again.

* * *

It was different this time.

The same strenuous push, the same swift fall through darkness, but somehow there was greater resistance, like friction, like wading through deep water, and it took endless moments to finally subside.

It was different, also, because Thor opened his eyes to near-darkness, to a quiet that was filled with distant sounds and a faint white hum. 

He was lying in a bed, and night was heavy beyond the windows. 

A soft rustle beside him. The bed’s other occupant reaching out and clasping a hand to his arm. 

Thor turned his head and found Loki looking back at him, and in the dim light—his eyes adjusting—Thor could see his brother’s smile, the mottled shadows on his face.

And so close to Thor’s memories, the way he looked, only older. This could almost have been a dream. 

But it was real, and Loki threaded his fingers with Thor’s and sat up, pulling Thor gently along with him. Climbing carefully out of the bed and making their way across a floor lush with a thick rug, its fibers soft between their bare toes. Hushed steps. A broad expanse leading to the window, and a dark, silky curtain that Loki pulled back.

It seemed they stood at the top of the world, and Thor was sure he had never been so high up before, for all the tiny, flickering lights below, laid out in jagged patterns that seemed to spin as Thor stared. No tree could be so tall. No mountain, either, surely. Yet here they were.

“Look at that,” Loki breathed beside him, squeezing his palm, and the fingers of Loki’s other hand traced slowly down the shiny glass. 

Thor wasn’t sure whether it was fright or awe that gripped him, only that it twisted in his innards and made his heart race, and he was glad when Loki gave another breath and turned to him fully, taking hold of his other hand and smirking in that familiar way while pushing him back toward the bed they had just left. 

“I think we’re going to like these lives,” Loki said, between kisses, between touches, between finding out that the body he had taken over was indeed handsomely endowed and seeking to discover whether the one that housed Thor’s spirit was weak to some of Loki’s favorite tricks. 

Thor could only hope that he was right.

* * *

They had not realized, though, that they had taken possession on what turned out to be the final hours of a weekend. 

When morning arrived, they were woken not by sun through the window but by a loud, insistent blaring from the bedside, and it didn’t cease when Loki smashed a fist on the clock radio.

Instead he was forced to blearily sit up and fumble for the little device making the noise. The telephone.

“Hello?”

Thor watched as he blinked and struggled and tried to listen to some thin, tinny voice on the other side. 

“Um. Yes. Yes, I suppose I can. Right.”

Loki hung up the phone after a few more words, then stared at the dark screen with wry amusement. 

“Apparently my host was expected in the office this morning,” he said.

Thor raised an eyebrow.

“As is the candidate whose campaign he is managing.”

Thor watched in confusion as after a few more moments Loki got up and started rummaging in the closet, pulling out a dark suit jacket and then peering at the tag, as if unsure which man’s body this garment was designed to fit.

He was halfway dressed before he looked up again, pointedly.

“I did mean _ you_, Thor.” 

Thor truly stared then. “You cannot mean for us to…”

“Of course I do. These are our lives now. The sooner we begin learning, the sooner it will become second nature.”

The feeling of dread in the pit of Thor’s stomach deepened. But for the moment… for the moment it was just easiest to obey.

* * *

Thor soon learned how little he liked politics.

It was not that he proved to be bad at it. Loki—somehow—soaked up everything around them almost effortlessly, and he was always there at Thor’s side, slipping him cues or buying him a moment when he needed one. And with Loki’s help, Thor proved in fact rather skilled at it. He had a manner that seemed to make people trust him. Believe him. Believe _ in _him.

The problem was that _ he _didn’t.

From what he had so far been able to gather, the man whose body he was possessing had been good at seeming trustworthy as well. But his actions, his beliefs, the things Thor learned of the role he was expected to fill in that man’s stead—sometimes the cruelty of it made him feel nauseated. The cruelty disguised as common sense. The lies, the petty greed.

It felt disturbingly familiar, though he couldn’t have explained it. The times in which they had lived had been much simpler, much different, yet this was all the same old ills, in a new form.

He voiced this to Loki on one of the first few days, when they were alone, in the back of an opulent vehicle driven by an expressionless man in a sharp black suit, on the way to some engagement or other. 

“If you find his platform so abhorrent, we can remake it,” Loki answered, while caressing Thor’s thigh (Loki seemed to enjoy making such secretive displays now, the tiny echo of a taboo about it, the hidden thrill). “Don’t worry about that.”

“I didn’t think we’d be here long enough for that.”

At that, Loki’s mouth twisted, and he glanced away, out through the smoked glass of their chariot. “Well, why not stay a bit longer? We’re only just getting good at this. We’ll leave eventually, but there’s no need to rush, is there? It’ll be hard to find bodies as well suited to us again.”

And Thor couldn’t deny that. He couldn’t deny how enjoyable it was, when it was merely them together. When he could forget about the rest of it. 

The rest of it always pressed upon him again, like a pressure on his brow. 

Thor wasn’t sure what to do, though, so for the time being, he simply continued playing the part Loki gave him to play.

* * *

Thor was fairly sure years had passed since the previous time, the first two men whose lives they’d briefly inhabited. The world seemed darker somehow. Thor imagined he caught sensations from the aether, from the collective minds of a world full of living people, and it felt overwhelmingly like a tangle of fear and hate and hunger, sickness and spite and a certainty of impending doom. 

Unlike the other couple whose bodies they had borrowed, this pair did not dwell in a safe, comfortable town with fresh-paved sidewalks running through plots of fresh-mown grass. Their dwelling, it turned out, was on the 31st floor of a massive, ugly tower.

When Thor first truly understood this, he stood at the window, staring out, knuckles white even behind the thick glass. 

A brownish fog hung over the city below in daylight. And there was hardly any green in sight, either outside or within. The dwelling, the building—opulence, glass and crystal, brushed metal, shiny silk. Isolation and faceless splendor.

The city beyond—air that made him cough, odors he recognized but disliked to identify (squalor, misery, people living in ways no one should have to live), crumbling concrete. Suspicion and shouted arguments on street corners. 

Thor did not like this world.

And he hated that his task, apparently, was to stand before cameras and pretend that all this was as it should be. He stood before them, tailored suit on his borrowed body, blond hair tied back in a tidy ponytail, and he said whatever Loki told him to say. He smiled when the cameras flashed, looked intent and serious when the press shouted questions. And somehow no one saw anything wrong with any of it.

A week had passed when he sat with Loki in their dwelling after the workday was done, a drink in both their hands, but Loki was still poring through a stack of papers.

“You’re even better at this than he was,” Loki mused after a while, only then seeming to remember his glass, taking a long sip of rich red wine. “Your poll numbers are up a full five points. The people love you.”

Thor couldn’t help his own grimace. “The things you’ve told me to say, though. Why do you have me support such callous things?”

“I've told you already, you can’t just change that overnight. You’d be seen as inconstant.”

Thor tasted another mouthful of his own wine. It was the third glass, and it wasn’t helping. “Perhaps I should lose. Then it won’t matter.”

His brother looked at him with mild alarm at that. “If such things truly matter to you, you wouldn’t want that. If you win, you’ll have the power to change things, and politicians never keep their campaign promises anyway so you won’t have to do anything you don’t like.”

Thor tried to think of it that way. But his soul felt stained each time he stood at the podium. And more than that. His soul felt stained by all of it. What they were doing. What they were making themselves part of. And stealing the lives of these men to do it, no matter what he thought of their occupations.

Another glass of wine, and Thor truly began to feel the effects, his mind going hazy. A little detached. His voice slurred.

He wasn’t sure they’d had wine this good when they were alive before…

“You don’t care, though,” he said, and Loki’s eyes fixed on him quizzically. “You don’t care whether we do harm or good. You just want to be alive, and you don’t care who we must kill to do it.”

By the time Thor fell silent this time, his twin’s face was a stony grey. 

“You’re right that I want to live,” Loki said, cold. “But how dare you say I don’t care. Do you have any idea why I chose these men, these bodies?”

Thor blinked; his vision was blurring, but the insistence in his brother’s voice kept him rapt. “Because they look like us,” Thor said. “Because they have all of this…” he swept his hand out in a gesture at the wealth around them.

Loki’s eyes narrowed. “No. Because we’re _ better than them_. We know what it’s like to suffer, in a way they never have. We are better and we will do better things with their lives. We deserve this! They don’t!”

Thor shook his head, unsteady. Inebriation made Loki’s words almost make sense, and it made it harder for Thor to follow his own logic, the certainty that he felt each day. But he still knew.

“I don’t want to be a murderer,” he pleaded.

“You’re not! You will never be. _ You _ will be less of a murderer than either of them were. You’ll save people, and I’ll help you. I promise, brother. We will do good! We’ll save the helpless ones. We’ll save the ones who would be sacrificed by these people.”

Thor frowned.

That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair for Loki to say that, to use that argument with him. Loki knew he couldn’t resist. 

The lure was too great. His brother was too persuasive. If Thor stayed, he would end up giving in. 

Thus he had to put a stop to this. He had to find a way to make Loki listen. Only he had no idea how. 

As they made their way to bed, the inebrious feeling of slipping, of being on the verge of coming loose from this flesh gave Thor an idea, and he knew what he had to do.

*


	3. Resistance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor carries out his plan to get Loki to agree to leave. The outcome is not at all what he had intended.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone reading and letting me know you're enjoying this so far!

Timing would be everything. 

Thor knew that, so he waited for the right moment. He needed a moment when Loki was at his most agreeable, his most relaxed and willing to compromise. He needed a moment when Loki would be most inclined to give in to him, however begrudgingly it might be. And he needed one where he could carry out the threat if it came to that, though he hoped it wouldn’t. 

The moment came that weekend, after all their obligations had been taken care of and they turned their attentions to each other, to their own desires. The world and all its distasteful daily tasks shut out. Even the walls of the apartment blurred from Thor’s focus, his awareness only on these few feet of space, the other body in his arms.

Making love with Loki was just as good as it had always been, and in the previous few days Loki had gotten them satin sheets to make it all the more luxurious. So Thor was lying half naked with his brother sweating and spent between his legs, when he said it. 

Thor reached down and stroked his fingers through dark hair until Loki grinned up at him. 

“It’s time, brother,” Thor said. 

Loki tilted his head, placed a brief kiss on Thor’s hipbone. “Time for what?”

“Time for us to go back and leave these bodies.”

Only then did Loki’s smile fall. 

Thor went on, though, before he could refuse. “I am serious, brother, and if you will not go with me… then I will go by myself.”

“Thor, you can’t.”

Loki had by then gotten to his feet and he was beginning to pace at the end of the bed. The face of the man was already pale, but now his skin was moon-white, and new sweat broke upon his damp brow. 

“I can,” Thor answered, hoisting himself up on his elbows. “I will. You don’t get to choose this for me.”

Loki spun, teeth bared. “Yet you get to choose for both of us?”

Thor smiled sadly. “No, I suppose I don’t.”

Thor arose then long enough only to wipe himself clean and collect his discarded sleeping garments and put them on—some strange compulsion to modesty on his host’s behalf—before he lay back down.

All the while, Loki watched him, eyes narrowed. “Thor, what are you doing?”

“Exactly as I have told you I would. Will you not change your mind, brother?”

“Thor?”

Thor then breathed a deep sigh and closed his eyes. 

And though it was harder to separate himself from this body without his twin to guide him, he remembered the process well enough, and moments later he felt himself released from that physical form, spreading out into the spirit realm, the haze coming down all around him. 

And he watched, with a curious detachment, as Loki began to panic, reaching out and shaking his former host’s unconscious body.

But that state of affairs did not last for long. 

* * *

“I’m glad you and your lover are adventurous,” Loki said to the man chained to a chair in the bedroom. Silver handcuffs gleamed at his wrists. A thick leather collar around his throat, and that was affixed to chains that wrapped back over the chair, through the cuffs, around his waist, down to his ankles. 

It hadn’t taken Loki long once he had realized the body’s original owner was awakening.

The man frowned, brows drawn in—more outrage in his expression than fear. He clearly wasn’t used to true danger. Maybe he didn’t know how much he was in.

“I hope you’re watching this, Thor,” Loki murmured, voice strained, as he held the knife to the man’s throat. “This isn’t easy for me. He looks too much like you. But I  _ will _ do it, if you force my hand.”

With a yank, Loki pulled the gag out of the man’s mouth.

He growled. “What the fuck—Trevor, what the fuck are you doing? Who the fuck is Thor? What is this about?”

Loki grabbed him by the hair, tangling his fingers in blond strands and pulling back until the man’s neck strained. He smiled, vicious.

“I’m not your lover. And I’m terribly sorry about this, but it’s my brother’s fault. He has been possessing your body for the last several days, as I am possessing your  _ Trevor _ . I have decided to stay, and my brother believes this is murder. It isn’t. But it will become murder if he refuses to return.”

Now the man’s blue eyes were wide, and still there was nothing in them but stubborn anger. It had not yet occurred to him to be afraid. 

“I’ll be disappointed,” Loki continued, voice low. “Because your body suits him very well and I’ve been enjoying fucking him in it—”

The man’s face twisted oddly, going red, his breathing harsh.

“—but I will do it. Make no mistake.”

Thor could see the veneer of anger at last growing thin. The man’s broad shoulders rising and falling, and the horror grew inside Thor in time with it.

How terrible it must be, how beyond comprehension. To hear his life threatened by a beloved voice proclaiming itself a stranger. To have a knife pressed to his neck by a hand he had trusted.

Thor would have shuddered, would have wept.

When Loki clenched his jaw and made the first shallow cut, a gasp slipping from the man’s lips, Thor broke. 

In moments it was his own breath gasping, it was him feeling the oddly cold trickle down his neck, the burning line of the knife.

“Loki,” he whimpered. “Loki, stop. You’ve won. I’m back.”

Before him, Loki blinked.

Thor was expecting relief, happiness. Perhaps even gloating. He was not expecting… 

Loki’s face crumpled in bitter, furious hurt. He threw the knife to the ground. It thumped quietly on the thick rug.

“Fuck you, Thor.”

After a little bit of pleading, Loki did remove the chains, though. He huffed angry breaths through his nose all the while. 

“You actually left,” he complained. 

Guilt swelled in Thor’s throat. “I did warn you. I told you I meant to.”

“Do you  _ want _ to be separated from me forever?” Loki said, voice shrill with outrage. “Is that what you were aiming for?”

Crestfallen, appalled, Thor shook his head.

“Because if we were to remain apart like that, you in the spirit realm and me here… if we stayed like that for long... ” He was raving, eyes glinting madly. “ I don’t know whether it would happen, whether we might really lose each other, but do you want to take the chance?”

“You could have just followed me,” Thor muttered.

“Don’t,” Loki hissed through clenched teeth. “Don’t make this my fault. It isn’t, and you know I’m right.”

Thor made no reply.

Loki’s eyes wandered to the chains, the cuffs, the collar still lying discarded on the floor, and a cruel glint came into his eye. 

Thor was expecting what came next, and he did not resist. Anger poured off Loki’s stolen body in waves, and possessiveness… and even upset as he was, Thor could not deny his own reaction to that emotion in his brother, his twin.

Loki had him chained on the bed before he could have protested, even if he’d wanted to. And Loki’s anger was great enough that he did not remove Thor’s clothing first. 

Soft flannel pajamas, a blue and green plaid pattern that he had rather liked. But Loki took up his knife again, brandished it in the light before crawling onto the bed. 

“You do not ever listen to me,” he grumbled.

He slid the blade under the elastic waistband of Thor’s pajama bottoms, pulled sharply up, slicing through it with a ripping sound that Thor felt in his skin. 

But Thor stayed still. He had little choice.

The knife drew an off-balance line, down the top of Thor’s thigh, cutting more of the fabric away. 

“You don’t listen to me, even though you know I’m right. You always liked being the good one. The trustworthy one. You listened to them because they praised you for it.”

Flannel tore and slipped away from his other leg, and Loki yanked the scraps from beneath him. The air of the bedroom felt cold on his bare flesh, and he squirmed. 

“You wanted to be praised, so you were the obedient one. Even when I was right. No matter what it cost us.”

Loki had calmed by then enough to undo the buttons that held closed the pajama shirt, and he did so, spreading it wide and revealing Thor’s chest. 

Loki still kept his hold on the knife as he bent down to lick one of the little pink nipples he had revealed. Thor felt the flat of the cool metal when it came to rest on his belly, the grip fitted into Loki’s palm.

“And you didn’t see sense until they’d killed us both. Until they made us watch each other die.”

Saltwater flowed down from Thor’s eyes. And the blurring made it so he didn’t at once see what Loki did when he sat back. 

Loki took the knife and with it he cut deep into the pad of his own hand, then held the bleeding limb above Thor’s chest. Red drops dripped down, pattering like hot rain, stinging like needles. 

“And now you’re doing the same thing again.” 

Thor’s face was wet with tears and his chest was wet with his brother’s blood when Loki at last pushed his thighs apart, smearing cold, squelching lube between them. 

It was no surprise that Loki had not lost interest, his erection hard and hot and insistent against Thor’s leg while he readied him, his mouth slack, eyes devouring. 

It was more surprising that Thor’s own lust could be reawakened in such a state, chained and gazing up at his brother’s fury, guilt roiling inside him alongside ancient memories. 

Loki had been right long ago, but that did not mean he was right this time, and…

Thor gasped out a long moan, brow knitting with the agonizing pleasure when Loki finally lifted up his hips and entered him. His arms still chained, the collar still upon his neck, he had no choice but to submit, and Loki filled him in a long, slow stroke and then let him adjust only a moment before setting a cruel pace to his thrusts. 

“If you want me to be the wicked twin, brother, that’s what you’ll get,” Loki panted. “And I’ll do what’s best for both of us. The rest of the world can burn. And do not dare tell me they deserve any better.”

Thor pretended to himself that he heard none of these words, focusing only on the feeling of Loki inside him, Loki fucking him harshly, the chains and collar and his brother’s grunts of exertion only exciting him more. 

Thor could feel it, the swell of Loki’s cock as he got close, preparing to spill hot seed within Thor’s body, and Loki leaned down then to kiss him.

Thor’s chest was still wet with Loki’s blood. And it smeared between them as Loki came. 

He collapsed as soon as the throbbing ceased, but Thor beneath him—not yet sated—squirmed. 

When Loki sat back he looked weary. Bitter.

“Brother,” Thor pleaded.

Loki sighed, and without a word he wrapped a hand around Thor’s urgent erection. Slipped two fingers inside him. Began pumping both at once, in rhythm, silently, until Thor tensed and shuddered and came as well, his own semen mingling with the redness on his sternum.

In the aftermath, after the chains came off again, Loki merely looked sad. Exhausted. He sagged on the edge of the bed. 

Thor helped him get cleaned up and his hand properly bandaged, mustering energy for himself from who knew where. Thor tucked them both into bed, and he lay beside his brother, aching and waiting for something to be said. 

It was harder, not knowing each other’s thoughts. 

Loki spoke at last. “We’re keeping these bodies,” he muttered just before closing his eyes.

Dread settled into the pit of Thor’s stomach, dread and old questions.

_ What right had they to live? Did they truly embody the evils of the world, and would it all be better if they ceased to walk the earth, as they had once been taught? Could they only do good by dying?  _

Thor had long since stopped asking. He had long since stopped wondering, practically forgotten the questions. But now, once again, they echoed in his head, and he still did not have any answers. 

He had uncertainty. Doubt, and fears beneath it. And some other unfathomable feeling, like dark water, churned in his belly, made his fists clench beneath the silken sheets.

Thor had lain there for what felt like hours before he realized that it was anger. Anger at being trapped, anger at his brother for forcing him into this, anger at having to do all these things he had not chosen.

The waters seethed, and he hated the feeling more than anything else.

He did not sleep for quite some time.


	4. Help

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thor has a new plan to get his brother to leave these bodies. But who can he go to for help?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only one more chapter to go! Hope you guys are still liking this thing!

Not two weeks later, Thor found her.

Once he found her, it was a simple enough matter to arrange a meeting—money and privilege and clout were indeed useful to have, and it was not even too difficult to discreetly have one of his staff arrange it all while Loki was busy with other tasks.

He arranged to meet Dr. Foster over lunch at a fancy sushi bar downtown, and she had been intrigued enough by his cryptic invitation to agree. 

“Your specialization is rare,” he said after introductions, after shaking her hand with his own now quite practiced grip, meeting her wary eyes. “Rare, and especially rare to find someone who is truly so talented and open-minded.” 

Thor had spent days furtively searching on the internet for scholars well versed in a particular era of history and who also would admit to making a study of the notion of spirits. Dr. Foster had been the only one for hundreds of miles around who showed any promise for his purposes. 

She gave him a slightly stiff grin. “Thanks, but I’m just wondering why a politician would want to talk to me about my work. You guys don’t usually go in much for facts.”

Before he answered, Thor glanced around as casually as he could to check for any too-interested onlookers. “That’s true. But tell me what you know about sacred twins.”

Dr. Foster’s brow knitted. “Sacred twins? It wasn’t an uncommon idea in folklore a few thousand years ago. Twins were seen as split souls, something abnormal and outside the bounds of society, so they didn’t have to obey the culture’s conventions. Some societies treated them like living gods. Others were very suspicious of them. And sometimes it was both, and when that happened they often became the receptacle for all the pent-up anger within the group. Often they ended up as sacrifices, and then their bones would be objects of veneration…”

Thor managed not to flinch as he listened, instead trying to gauge whether she would believe him. Whether it was safe to tell her. Whether she would be able to help if he did.

He decided, at last, that she looked kind. He decided that he trusted her. And then he told her things about sacred twins that she did not yet know.

Two hours later, he left the restaurant, feeling lighter, and called for his driver.

She had quizzed him for a long time. She had frowned at him in suspicion, disbelief. She had grown frustrated—perhaps understandably—when he’d had to tell her that most of what he knew of the spirit realm simply could not be conveyed. But eventually she had said she believed him.

And then she had agreed to do what she could.

Thor had felt mostly calm all through the conversation until that point. Until he had to ask what he had come to ask.

His heart had pounded in his chest. Sweat sprung up on his brow. His fists tightened in his lap.

“An exorcism?” Dr. Foster answered, disbelief in her voice.

Thor frowned, bowing his head. “It isn’t precisely the right word, I suppose? But I don’t know how else to say it. It’s just that my brother refuses to leave, and I don’t know how to make him. I have tried all I could. So I need your help. But you must not harm him! Above all else, he and I must remain together. You must promise me, whatever your solution, you must promise me we will be together and we will not be harmed.”

Dr. Foster had studied him for a long moment, then, a deep furrow in her brow.

Then at last she nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I can promise you that. And I think we can do what you need. I’ll just need some time to figure out how.” 

As they parted ways, she had clasped his hand warmly, and Thor breathed a sigh of deep relief.

When Thor went home that night, the relief warred with guilt in his chest. And more so when Loki was playful as he had not been in weeks, demanding kisses as soon as Thor walked in the door. Pushing him against the wall, his shoulder blades striking it while Loki’s hands clasped Thor’s waist and Loki’s lips brushed against his jaw.

Thor felt like he had cheated. He felt he had betrayed his brother—and hadn’t he? It had surely been the right thing to do. But it was still a betrayal.

“Do you ever really think about it?” Loki said while nuzzling him, hands sneaking inside his garments. “No one will ever be able to threaten us again now. We’re free. We’re safe. We have each other.”

Thor nodded, biting his lip.

Free and safe and together.

Loki shoved their trousers down just enough to grind against him, skin to skin, holding so tight.

And Thor had just set things in motion to end this.

For days, Thor had been trying not to think of it, the old memories that had been rising to the surface of his mind, yet still they came, in dreams and waking. 

The first time he’d discovered that his brother did not accept their fate… the first time he’d realized Loki did not see the necessary symmetry of it... 

They had still been teenagers, and he found Loki wiping at his eyes in a shadowy corner of the temple, red splotches of anger on his face. 

“It’s not right,” Loki whispered into his ear when Thor finally got him to speak. “It… I don’t want to do it.”

“But we must,” Thor answered. “It’s what we were born for. We have lived well. We have been given everything we desired. And now we will be able to do some good in return; we can protect them all.”

“How?” Loki spat the word, accusing. “It’s for nothing. There is no reason for it. Just to punish us for existing… just to watch us suffer!”

Thor flinched. “That’s not true.”

Loki had turned away then, stubborn, and Thor could get no more whispers out of him that day.

* * *

For many of the coming nights, Thor lay awake, wondering how Dr. Foster would do what she had claimed. _ If _ she would be able to do it at all. She had promised to contact him when she was almost ready to go ahead, but Thor had heard nothing.

How would she be able to expel Loki from that body if he did not wish to leave? And how would she prevent him from simply moving on to the next? How would she ensure that they remained together through it all?

Thor pondered all of this nervously. He could not imagine what means she might have or devise. Yet he had believed her earnestness when she said there was a way, and he had trusted her gentle smile when she promised it could be done without harming either of them, and he had to believe it could be done, because he had seen what his brother might do if he were allowed to continue this. 

Loki had left him no choice but to put his faith in this plan. 

There was a queasiness in his stomach each time he thought about it as he waited. Each time his brother spoke to him as if nothing were wrong.

When Dr. Foster’s number flashed on the screen of his phone one afternoon two weeks later, Thor’s heart was racing before he could hit the button to answer. 

“Yes?” he said, breathless.

“Hello, Thor? I think we’re just about ready to get started, but I will need a few things from you,” Dr. Foster said, sounding just a little apologetic. “Nothing difficult, I think. Mainly logistics. We need to set up our equipment at the site, and probably the best place for that is in your home, so we’ll need access first…”

Thor listened, and his nervousness was jangling inside him. He swallowed. “Loki will not go willingly. If he sees anything amiss…”

“He won’t notice a thing. We’ll be very discreet.”

Thor still could not set aside the uneasy feeling. “Very well. But will you tell me, first, what you plan to do? I would like to know how it works.”

There was a muffled clattering on the other end of the line, as if she had shifted the phone in her hand. “Well,” she said, “from what you told me about the process of possessing someone else’s body, you don’t actually _ replace _ the original inhabitant, so to speak? That means you’re not as well knitted in as you would be in your own natural body. And the right kinds of drugs should make it impossible for you to hold on. We think we can get him out that way.”

Thor bit at his lip. “But how will you prevent him from simply doing it again, to this man or some other?”

There was a brief pause. “That was the part that took a little longer to figure out. There are plenty of descriptions of spirits in folklore, and some of them even have instructions for things like this, but the problem was figuring out which ones held some grain of truth and then looking at those in light of modern science to come up with something that should actually work. What most of those accounts agree on is that there is a boundary between the spirit realm and the living world, and it can be made more or less permeable. I think I can make it impermeable just to _ him_. We even found some ancient incantations for that, but really they were just about manipulating the vibrations…”

Thor listened as she went on, and he tried to follow her explanation, but while it was comforting to hear the confidence in her voice as she spoke, the words made little sense to him.

It didn’t really matter. 

“I’m really grateful to get to help you with this,” Dr. Foster added at the end. “Not many people ever get this kind of opportunity. We’re going to learn so much.”

The rest of the conversation was involved in practical matters. They chose the date, made arrangements for him to get a set of keys to her through one of his staff. She gave him a few instructions, explaining that the drug would be in a bottle of wine that would be left for them in a certain location, and that he should share it with Loki when it was time.

“I know, I know you don’t need it and you’ll go willingly, but with our equipment… if you want to make sure you’ll stay together, you should go at the same time. It’ll just be simpler this way. You won’t have to worry about anything.”

Thor thanked her sincerely, a lump in his throat. 

* * *

There were only a few days until it was to happen, and it was hard for Thor to be calm during them. 

It was hard not to have final doubts, worries creeping up inside him like climbing vines.

He was enjoying being alive again, no matter how different the world was, no matter how this life at times unsettled him, no matter how this world’s inequities upset him. He had been right that giving all this up again would grow harder as time went on, and he was feeling it keenly already.

He was enjoying having a body again, all the things he had forgotten. Sensations, desires, all of them that faded into unreality without flesh to support them. And without them, thought and being changed as well. It was indescribable, the difference. In the spirit realm, one might lose focus, drifting on an errant thought and return to find a hundred years had passed. Alive, in a body, one could not last much more than an hour before some need or sensation importuned. And many things that were incomprehensible when bodiless made perfect sense to him now.

Loki had lately been indulging in sensation as well, and Thor could not resist him any more than he ever had. 

* * *

“I promise, it will be lovely,” Loki said while Thor eyed the array of materials Loki had gathered for their evening’s activities. And, in truth, Thor did not doubt him. 

“What must I do?”

That got a grin. “Just lie there and do not move. Allow me to do as I choose. _Entrust yourself_ to me. You’ll like it.”

So Thor had done. He’d let Loki tell him to disrobe, and then he had lain like a feast atop the silky sheets, and he had allowed Loki to tie a cloth over his eyes to block his vision as well. 

And Thor had not known exactly what to expect, but it had not been what he felt at first, the sudden sensation of cold, sliding along his skin, leaving wet trails behind.

In their old lives, they had rarely seen ice outside of the dead of winter. And now it was such a simple thing—there was a machine in every home that could create it, to be put in drinks or dispensed for any other minor need.

Thor shivered at the sensation as it awakened every nerve. 

What followed after was drops of heat, and Thor could smell the burning of the candle as Loki tipped it above his skin. 

But even this—even this was something new, for when the drops fell they did not harden and stick but instead turned to a smooth, soft oil, which Loki then rubbed with the heels of his hands until Thor was sighing with pleasure, with the simple bliss of relaxation, of being cared for and attended to with the closeness and devotion of a lover.

This world, this life, offered so many new things that they had never before known.

This was all so different from the life they had lived before; there had once been moments such as this, but laced through with tension, like an unwelcome flavor that could spoil a whole meal. Their bodies had once been attended—by the servants of the temple, who cared only that they be perfected for their ultimate fate. Men and women who taught them and trained them and bathed them and fed them, out of duty and belief. But the twins had only each other for comfort. For anything truly of love. Only each other.

Loki waited until Thor’s body was utterly loose from the sensitive soles of his feet to the long, strong muscles of his thighs. Until his chest had been kneaded soft and his hands lay unclenched and oiled at his sides. Until his head lolled and his mouth fell slack and he felt the slow hum of pleasure all along his spine up to the base of his neck. Only then did Loki attend to him between his legs, and hushed him so he did not tense again but merely allowed the sensations to sweep over him in tender waves while Loki’s hands coaxed the seed from his body, gentle.

And afterward, after the blindfold came off and Thor had panted and kissed and whimpered back to himself and fully recovered, his eyes blinking and his heart slowing at last, Loki revealed a final treat. Something so simple, Thor could not have anticipated: fancy little sweets made of white chocolate and filled with something creamy and honey-flavored. They glittered in their box with (Loki said) a dusting of real gold. 

Thor and his twin lay together and fed each other from their hands and gazed into each others’ eyes before they thought up what they wanted to do next.

And all of it—the taste was unfamiliar and sweet and Thor wondered if this was what it was to be alive. If this was what it was supposed to be and they were only getting to know it now.

Thor tried merely to savor it rather than letting himself think of how—and why—it would soon be coming to an end.


	5. Last Days on Earth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The time has come for the exorcism Thor arranged.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we are! Happy Halloween, everyone!

The last day before it was to happen, it rained. 

Thor asked his twin to come walking with him anyway. He wanted to feel it, the air, the rain, the cold. He wanted to breathe those scents, watch the clouds speed and churn.

He had still not quite been able to determine how long it had been since they lived. Two thousand years? Three? 

But with his twin’s hand in his and the walkways of this strange, dreary, astonishing city beneath his feet and the same eternal rain falling on his face, he thought of it with wonder. 

He wished they could stay. If the world had been fair, they should have had this as their due for all they once suffered. They should have been able to have this without stealing it, without taking from others as was once taken from them.

It could not be. But he wanted it, with a longing deep within. 

The worst part was that—just as Loki had said—this was the first time, really, that they’d ever been free.

Raised in the temple, their fate had already been set. And where Thor had accepted it and embraced the role they would fill, Loki had chafed at it.

Any time they fought, that was likely the source. It had made Loki furious. 

But in these bodies, alive again and this time with no such set fate, with no one controlling their actions or determining their lives for them, they had not fought in weeks. Not since Thor had returned from his ill-fated attempt. 

They were both redefining themselves now that no one remained who knew what they were, now that no one called them the sacred twins.

When the rain began to come down harder, Thor tugged at his brother’s hand and they ran together for the shelter of a shop’s awning, and once they had reached it Thor could not help but wrap his brother in an embrace. 

Damp black hair against his cheek. A slender form in his arms, warm and humming and so very familiar.

That night Thor dreamed. And in his dream he was awoken by the temple attendants, though his twin was already out of bed, standing nervously by the window as if he might bolt, the white robe they’d been dressed in the night before wrinkled and loose on his trembling shoulders.

The temple attendants had brought them soft bread and honey-butter, a ceremonial meal, and glasses of yellow wine, and they ate in silence, sometimes glancing briefly up, eyes meeting across the round little table, their knees almost touching beneath it.

Once they had eaten, the temple attendants beckoned, and Thor watched as his twin took the first awkward, halting step to follow.

“I won’t leave without you,” Loki had told him the night before. 

In Thor’s dream the temple attendants led them into the courtyard, harsh sun shining down and his brother’s hand in his, cold and weak and shaky, as they followed.

* * *

The morning of the day it was to happen, there was a meeting, and during it, Loki announced the first of a set of changes to Thor’s official stance on several important issues. It was a bold move, the murmurs from around the table said, but Loki… Loki was convincing enough to sell it somehow as consistent with the same _ core values _, and the meeting ended with a sense of optimism to the air. With energy, with hope for a better future. 

“You see?” Loki told him afterward, with a slick grin. “I told you we could do this. You just have to give it time. We’ll do some good here.”

Thor nodded and allowed Loki to sneak a deep kiss in the hallway, and he tried to calm his own rising doubts, his own uncertainties. 

He went through the rest of the day barely managing it. 

Could he even back out now if he chose? 

Certainly he could… he could contact Dr. Foster again and tell her he had changed his mind. There would be little she could do about it, right? No one would believe her if she told the tale—a well-known politician, host for the spirit of an ancient sacred twin, needing to be exorcised? No one would believe. 

But what, instead, if she chose to act anyway? At least this way he had some control. He knew when it would come. He knew they would be taken together. 

And after all, nothing had really changed, had it? So Loki had shown that they could, perhaps, do good here. Yet still they were taking these men’s lives. Thor could not forget that, no matter how tempting it might be. 

His stomach churned, uneasy, all afternoon. All the ride back to their apartment in the tower. 

“I’m not really hungry,” Thor said, when Loki suggested they call out for a supper of Thai food, and he felt drawn, like a terrible compulsion, to the cabinet where the bottle of wine would be waiting. “Let’s just have a drink.”

The bottle felt heavy in his hand, but he opened it without thinking. Set out two glasses.

“Hm,” Loki said with a quirk of his brow, and he licked his lips. “It’ll go right to your head like that, you know.”

Thor poured the wine.

* * *

Dr. Foster’s chemical potion, whatever it was, worked swiftly.

Thor waited until Loki had taken several sips before he began to drink his own, and he had barely finished a third of the glass before he could feel it. A buzzing warmth, at first, like intoxication. But instead of leveling off, it heightened, continuing to climb until it had taken over everything. 

He heard the crash of a glass breaking, falling, liquid splashing. 

“Thor,” Loki groaned out. It sounded like it took him tremendous effort to speak, and Thor realized he was somehow still gazing at his brother’s face. Watching his lips move, though he felt as if he could not see. As if his vision had dimmed, though his eyes were open. “What is… what is happening…?”

By then, though, Thor could make no answer. He found he was not forced out of the body he was in. Instead, he was frozen there. Paralyzed, unable to depart, unable to move, unable to speak. 

He saw, in the corners of his eyes, shadows moving, emerging out of the corners of the room. Forming into solid shapes. The short, slender shape of Dr. Foster. Another, a heavyset man, moving something large and bulky into the middle of the room. It hummed and clicked, and there were little lights on it.

“This is the one that contacted me. That one is his twin. Do you think we—”

Dr. Foster’s voice was cut off by the thump of Loki’s body collapsing to the floor, and she rushed over to crouch beside him. Out of the line of Thor’s sight, barely. He watched the top of her head move, and it was strange, not being able to move so much as his eyes, not being able to feel anything in this body except a rising terror, a sensation that everything was horribly wrong.

And, subtly, he could hear a distant noise, growing louder. An indescribable cacophony.

He became aware of an odor, the scorched wires and melted insulation reek of an electrical fire.

Crashing, shouting, sparks popping and glass shattering. A jerky rhythm of footsteps. A whistling like wind, like a storm. 

And inside his head—he thought—he heard Loki, roaring. The sound of furious rage that would not be stopped merely by the lack of flesh with which to enact it. 

He also heard Dr. Foster’s voice, sounding as if he were hearing it through water.

“We have that one! It’s the other twin causing this. He’s in our equipment. He shouldn’t be able to do this!” 

A different voice, older. The man. “And we only have that one until the elixir wears off. Jane, you get him into containment. I’ll handle our rogue.”

Loki’s roar went on, unceasing, and Thor began to pick up the stream of pleading thoughts behind it.

—_Thor why did you do this where are you I can’t see you I can’t feel you please Thor you have to get out I can’t help you why are they doing this why did you do this_—

Thor couldn’t answer. And try as he might, he couldn’t do as Loki said. He didn’t know how to get out of the body he wore; whatever the scientists had done, it had made escape impossible, at least for him. He did not know what Loki knew. He wasn’t as skilled. He had thought his twin would always be there to guide him.

The activity in the real world around him grew even more distant. The lights seemed thin. The eyelids of this body were partly closed now, and everything was hazy when he tried to look through them. All he could detect was one of the shapes moving. The larger one, not Dr. Foster. He had something dark in his hands as he paced around the edges of the room. 

“Something tells me this one is not going to go quietly.”

“Well, don’t dissipate him. I want both.”

“We may not have much choice.”

Thor heard Jane’s vaguely disappointed hum above him, and he wondered how he had ever thought her kindly.

Loki’s voice was even more frantic by then. The chaos in the room louder, fiercer, as Loki tried to fight them off. 

—_Thor! Please! They’re going to kill us again! Thor, don’t let them take you! Thor_—

Then, all at once, there was a low, buzzing whine that rose in pitch in time with a growing tension in the air, like pressure, and Thor could almost feel it. 

They had once been bound together, naked, while their people surrounded them, preparing to pelt them with heavy stones, their blood needing to be spilled in place of all other wrongs, and Thor had gazed into his brother’s weeping eyes—

There was a soft click, followed by silence.

The chaos in the room went still. 

The voice in Thor’s head was cut off in mid-plea. 

It all happened at the same moment, and in the aftermath, while Thor was stunned, the tension like pressure grew and it felt like the pull of a great wave drawing him down into thrashing water, deep and cold, and he heard Dr. Foster’s impatient mutter.

Then there was nothing but darkness and silence and a small, constrained space. 

And Thor was in it alone. 

* * *

That morning, the ritual had begun.

Loki hadn’t left him. He could have fled, but he would not leave his brother, his twin. He had stayed, no matter his words in the dark of the night before.

And now they were bound together naked, face to face, lying with their arms around each other. Embracing, but unable to truly protect each other. Unable to escape. 

_ The lover-twins would die together, and the peace and order of the community would be maintained thereby. _

And then there had been incantations accusing them of being the source of every petty conflict, chants describing all their lascivious sins, but Thor had not been able to comprehend a word of it. All he was aware of was the ghastly pallor of his brother’s face. The mindless, panicked terror in his eyes. 

They would have to watch each other die, helpless. 

Soon the blows would begin. Soon their own people would come for them, attacking them, destroying them, and Thor would see the deep, bloody mark where the stone struck Loki’s brow, the red trickling down his face. He would have to listen to his brother’s final whimpers, beneath the cacophony, the yells of outrage. 

Thor began to weep, understanding coming too late to save them. He pressed his face, wet with tears, hot with grief, against his brother's shoulder, felt the racing of his pulse beneath the pale skin.

And then it was happening, and Thor had tried to tell him, had tried to tell him he had been right, had tried to say he was sorry, but he couldn’t amidst all the noise.

All he could do was gaze at his twin’s face. The dazed look and all the blood. 

But even at the end there had been no accusation in his eyes. 

No accusation, only love. 

* * *

Time passed in this place that was not the spirit realm. In the small prison within which he was confined, bounded on each side with dark, with cold. Bodiless, it should not have been possible for it to feel constricting. Yet it did. 

Thor was sometimes aware of intrusions whose nature he could not understand, yet he knew he was being poked and prodded in some intangible way. 

Most likely the scientists tried to learn about spirits. Most likely they tried to understand what he was. 

But Thor’s mood was grim, and he tried at first to repel that groping force and later, when he learned that he could do nothing against it, he ignored it.

Perhaps if he stayed still and did not react, they would learn nothing and he would win. Perhaps someday they would give up and let him go. 

He did not truly care. 

Inside him, dark seas seethed, like the coming of a storm.

He had been thinking back on their final day each moment. Loki had done things he should not have been able to do.

Loki had shown him what was possible. 

And here, time flowed like water. A hundred years could pass and he would hardly notice. A hundred years to the living people who trapped him, to their machines and devices... 

Someday he would once again be free. 

And when that day came, either he and his brother would be reunited—if Loki was somewhere out there, alone, apart from him and waiting—

Or the world at last would feel Thor’s rage.

***


End file.
